Wittock floats the absent dad as an explanation for Jeanne’s affair. With Margarette lamenting that her vibrator would have made a better father than Jeanne’s mystery dad, can she blame her daughter for swooning over a pylon? (The film’s look is so exacting, even a stitched alligator on a polo shirt feels like scorn.) Her single mom Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot) screeches at birds to “shut up!” underneath a dim summer sun that appears to have abdicated its duties to disco balls and fluorescents. At Jeanne’s home, the peas are canned and the flamingos are plastic, and the wallpaper printed with leaves and flowers is a wan mimicry of vegetation. “Jumbo’s” production design, by William Abello, is riveted by how thoroughly modern humans have divorced themselves from their natural instincts.
Today, all sorts of objects clatter and plead for attention, including Jeanne’s cellphone, which nearly causes her to slip off her boyfriend’s fulcrum before the machine lowers her down like Superman rescuing Lois Lane. Two centuries after Hugo’s Gothic romance - itself a love letter to the grand cathedral - bells have more competition. To justify their lifestyle, the community points to “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” author Victor Hugo, who wrote “to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo.” More famously, objectum sexuality spokeswoman Erika Eiffel, took her spouse’s last name, and when she separated from the Parisian tower, rebounded with the Berlin Wall. In 2013, a Florida woman married a Ferris Wheel named Bruce, after a three-decade courtship. Objectophilia - lust for the inanimate - is real. Kudos to cinematographer Thomas Buelens for lighting the ripples as Jeanne licks a spill. There, the tone elevates from off-kilter indie to surrealistically lush as Wittock floods the screen with impossibly deep pools of grease. If one instead thinks of “E.T.” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Wittock is forgiven for cribbing the techniques Steven Spielberg perfected when shooting the bond between humans and non - though an erotic scene between Jeanne and Jumbo that drips with oil and desire is all hers. Her wide eyes look as full of longing as they did in Merlant’s breakthrough performance as the infatuated painter in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” making the French actress the new queen of frustrated passions. Merlant, fingers tickling crystalline notes on Jumbo’s glass knobs, gazes back in awe.
At midnight, when the couple is alone, Jumbo appears to communicate in grumbles and blinks - green for yes, red for no - as his radiant center pulses like a schoolboy’s heartbeat. In Wittock’s slender fable, the feeling might even be mutual.
During the night shift, Jumbo literally lights up Jeanne’s life, and while he’s not handsome in the traditional sense - especially to the girl’s aghast mother - when writer-director Zoé Wittock admires his whirling spirals, he’s an undeniable attraction (albeit one Jeanne must share with 32 other thrill-seekers at a time). Tall, dark and handsome? The crush that Noémie Merlant’s character, Jeanne, explores in “ Jumbo” is one out of three: a 25-foot-tall carnival ride who seduces the amusement park janitor as she spit-cleans his bulbs.